Lovely song for some Sunday solitude- “Cayman Islands” by Kings of Convenience“There are very many places I would like to go, but I can’t find the key to open my door”– Kings of Convenience, “The Weight of My Words” album “Quiet is the New Loud”“Through the alleyways To cool off in the shadows Then into the street Following the water There’s a bearded man Paddling in his canoe Looks as if he has Come all the way from The Cayman Islands” – Kings of Convenience, “Cayman Islands” album “Riot on an Empty Street”

In general, I live a life fairly indifferent to social media. Indeed it has many lovely advantages, but I just end up spending a lot more time in Nature…being bullied by mobs of roguish manatees attempting to overturn my craggy old kayak as it wheezes through the silky water; or swamping about through black plumes of swooping bats and amorous mosquitoes, with logs of alligators leering up at me through the glorious green murk with smiling eyes the colour of tea; or being pinched by wee crabbies in the ocean and dragged along in the frothy white wake of a rambunctious torrent of sharks and tarpon.

Bully crab…

Sometimes, too, I just snail along a pale, sandy trail that snivels through the verdant sylvan shadows, looking for the perfect place to nest and paw through an old dog-eared book for a little while.

I am not completely, immune, however. The Ice-Bucket Challenge somehow managed to creep into my hushed little tent of a life. And somehow, I found myself capitulating, as my friend, Kayla, of the northern end of the county, splashed me with details.

She had messaged me, and then suddenly a video was shimmering before me, and there was my chum, blathering away at the camera. She challenged two people, her sister and someone other victim, and then, after a pause, she suddenly blurted out, “and BABS!”

“Who on earth is Babs?” muttered the filmmaker, her mum, just before the roar of a gelid waterfall cascaded onto Kayla’s head, rendering her a corpse; and a snickering man quickly bolted from the scene of the crime.

“Er…I am that ‘Babs’ I fear,” I said to the video bleeping on the screen.

“You have 24 hours!” Kayla then bassooned at me, unfurling like a resurrection fern, as she began to recover from the glacial onslaught.

Oh dear.

A prospect more daunting than these logs here

Usually, the fads that scurry across the net are resisted by me. I shun them. If I happen to hear about them. I was going to happily shun this one, too. But then I probed, like a long-billed ibis probing the soft earth for grubs on a soggy morn, and I discovered what was behind it all.

“I have lived over two-thirds of my life with the threat of death hanging over me. Because every new day could be my last, I have developed a desire to make the most of each and every minute.” – Dr. Stephen Hawking (from the documentary “Hawking”)

This was different. To me, this was an event revealing the best in human beings- their sense of love, compassion and community, and their endless capacity for Hope and Triumph.

“Concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit, as well as physically.”-Dr. Stephen Hawking

I haven’t known anyone personally, in my life, who was diagnosed with ALS, but I am not unfamiliar to prematurely losing someone close via a vicious disease.

How could I not participate? I decided to accept the challenge.

Naturally, this act of frigid, muscle-paralyzing sluicing had to take place at the Sea. An old brine-faced block of barnacled driftwood like me could have it no other way.

So, this past Sunday, only having known about this challenge for less than a day, I dragged some camera equipment, a bucket with some ice, Sir and another poor victim, Thome, to the beach at dawn.

Poor, poor Sir…

Time to be sluiced in some icy brine.

Sprinkled with quotes from some amazing individuals having been diagnosed with ALS, here is the video I shot at the beach, documenting the cold and salty event.

The harbour lay bare and waiting. I strayed from the Sun, looming in the underbrush, gazing out at bony masts and old tattered umbrellas, dangling in the languid breeze. The wind turbines purred softly as towers of crisp white cloud dripped into dark sinuous waters. A blue darner hummed beside my ear, my mind strewn with white petals, my eyes reflecting mischief. I waited there, hidden, beside the chafing dock, and watched as boats groaned in and out, as the dolphins played and the clouds grew dark and bruised in the distance.

And at last I crawled out, and was overtaken by a Sea-Faring-Man. He gazed at me with soft, sagging eyes of crackling blue, shimmering through a russet, canyon face. And then he stepped into his lopsided vessel and slowly glided away without a word, sunlight pounding into his white-cotton back. And as I watched him, snaking reflections dancing along the rim of consciousness, I perceived something all too familiar in that depth of grief, that lesion of sadness, that seems to ever-dwell in Beauty…